“Yes, do,” Ivy said cheerfully. “I _must_ get this done. And I simply can’t while you girls chatter, and sigh, and ‘Oh!’ and ‘Ah!’ ” “You might let us see them first,” was Lucille’s final shot. Ivy made no reply. She sewed on quietly and busily when they really had gone. But on the whole she felt less affronted by Mr. Sên than she had. And she wondered if she ought not, in common politeness, to send him a line of thanks—formal thanks. The girls had envied her: that was clear. If further acquaintance was Sên King-lo’s desire, Miss Smith and Miss Wheeler had done more to accomplish his wish than Miss Julia had. CHAPTER VII If Sên King-lo had such a desire, he was scarcely aware of it. And a Chinese usually knows perfectly what all his own wishes are. There is very little that floats; most is securely fixed in Chinese mentality and character. He had liked her at Miss Julia’s supper table, and on the porch after supper, better than she had liked him, but she had interested him less than he had interested her. In the garden, under the live-oaks she had arrested his attention intensely. At the supper table probing, not impertinently or even intentionally, but just as we must probe any stranger with whom we speak for the first time—unless character and personality mean nothing to us, and to Sên King-lo they meant a very great deal—he had found little to hold him; nothing but pleasant girlhood and a touch of bitterness that, while he pitied it, did not attract him. In the garden she had charmed him and simply and solely because, as he had told her, she for a moment had looked to him less un-Chinese, or, to coin a fitter word, less dis-Chinese than any not Oriental woman had before, or than he’d have credited that any could. She, the tilt of her head, her coloring, a look in her eyes, the movement of her fine, blue-veined wrist, the jade-green of her straight-cut gown, the scarlet peppers dangling charm-like at her breast, the fan-used fern-frond, had made a sudden picture of home to him. And Sên King-lo was homesick—sometimes very homesick. And if she had looked to him a little Chinese-like, and he had been grateful to her for that, what he’d by chance heard her say had quickened his admiration as no mere beauty of person could have done—and Sên King-lo worshiped beauty. In that he was true to type. Chinese religions are somewhat a farce, a convention and not a force, but the Chinese strictly speaking religionless, are intensely and vitally religious, and they worship but two gods: ancestors and beauty. The technical gods of China are among its servants—hewers of wood, drawers of water—engaged often by the year or the day, treated and paid accordingly, punished when recalcitrant or slothful, dismissed without a character if too unsatisfactory. All of which the gods take lying down, and far more like unto lambs than Chinese servants do, who often make the welkin ring with their wailing and cursing.